BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) — Mourners laid to rest the last of 10 Black people killed in a racist attack at a Buffalo supermarket with a service on Saturday that became a call to action and an emotional plea to end the hate and violence that has wracked the nation.

The funeral for 86-year-old Ruth Whitfield — the oldest of the 10 people killed in the attack two weeks ago — included an impromptu speech by Vice President Kamala Harris. She attended the service at Mount Olive Baptist Church in Buffalo with second gentleman Doug Emhoff.

Harris told the mourners this is a moment in time for “all good people” to stand up to the injustice that happened at the Tops Friendly Market on May 14, as well as at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and in other mass shootings.

“This is a moment that requires all good people, all God-loving people to stand up and say we will not stand for this. Enough is enough,” said Harris, who wasn’t scheduled to speak and came to the microphone at the urging of the Rev. Al Sharpton. “We will come together based on what we all know we have in common, and we will not let those people who are motivated by hate separate us or make us feel fear.”

Following the funeral, Harris and Emhoff visited a memorial outside the supermarket. The vice president left a large bouquet of white flowers, and the pair paused to pray for several minutes. President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden had placed flowers at the same memorial on May 17 and had visited with the victims’ families. Biden is expected to head to Texas for a visit this weekend with the families of victim’s of Tuesday’s school shooting.

Harris later told reporters that the administration is not “sitting around waiting to figure out what the solution looks like” to the nation’s gun violence problem.

“We know what works on that,” she said, reiterating support for background checks and a ban on assault weapons.

“Let’s have an assault weapons ban,” she said. “An assault weapon is a weapon of war with no place, no place in civil society. Background checks: Why should anyone be able to buy a weapon that can kill other human beings without at least knowing: Hey, that person committed a violent crime before, are they a threat against themselves or others?”

Harris said the nation has to come together, as well.

“We have to agree that if we are to be strong as a nation, we must stand strong, identifying our diversity as our unity,” she said.

It’s been a sad week of goodbyes for family and friends of the Buffalo shooting victims, a group that includes a restaurant worker who went to the market to buy his 3-year-old’s birthday cake; a father and die-hard Buffalo Bills fan who worked as a school bus aide; and a 32-year-old sister who moved to the city to help a brother battling leukemia.

Whitfield, a grandmother and mother of four, had been inside the supermarket after visiting her husband of 68 years in a nursing home when a gunman identified by police as 18-year-old Payton Gendron began the deadly onslaught.

Authorities said Gendron, who is white, targeted the store three hours from his home in Conklin because it is in a predominantly Black neighborhood.

Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who delivered a fiery tribute to Whitfield at the beginning of the funeral service, called for all “accomplices” who aided and abetted “this monster” who opened fire in the supermarket to be held accountable, from the gun manufacturers and distributors to the parents of the suspect.

Crump said those those who “instructed and radicalized this young, insecure individual” should also be held to account for taking Whitfield from her family, the Buffalo community and the planet. He called her “one of the most angelic figures that we have ever known.”

“It is a sin that this young depraved man, not a boy, went and killed Ruth Whitfield and the ‘Buffalo 10,’” Crump said, referring to the victims.

Sharpton described being floored to learn the shooter live-streamed his assault on Twitch, noting how his mother had grown up in Alabama, where hooded members of the Ku Klux Klan once killed Black people.

Today, he said, white supremacists “are proud to practice racism.”

Sharpton made a pitch for gun control measures during his eulogy, saying all communities need to come together and “disarm the haters.”

“There is an epidemic of racial violence that is accommodated by gun laws that allow people to kill us,” he said. “You ain’t got to love us, but you shouldn’t have easy access to military weapons to kill us.”

In all, 13 people were shot in the attack which federal authorities are investigating as a hate crime. Three people survived.

Whitfield was the mother of former Buffalo Fire Commissioner Garnell Whitfield.

Gendron is charged with first-degree murder and is being held without bail. His attorney has entered a plea of not guilty on his behalf.

Pool reports were contributed to this story. Haigh reported from Connecticut.

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McCarthy’s attorney, Elliot S. Berke, criticized the committee from all angles, claiming the subpoenas it issued to lawmakers are not constitutional or valid because it failed to meet certain legal requirements.

The Republican leader’s argument that the committee is not legal or constitutionally valid echoes those made by a number of subpoena targets who have attempted to make a legal claim that they do not need to comply. Judges have rejected that argument.

US District Court Judge Tim Kelly said in a recent case involving the committee’s request for documents from the Republican National Committee and one of its vendors that the request was well within its scope as a legislative body.

In addition to McCarthy, the panel subpoenaed four other House Republicans: GOP Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio, Andy Biggs of Arizona, Mo Brooks of Alabama and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania. Jordan, Biggs and Perry have also pushed back on subpoenas the committee has issued them.

Berke specifically focused on the make-up of the committee, claiming it was partisan in nature and did not have the necessary input from House Republicans in order to issue subpoenas to members of Congress.

While House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected McCarthy’s selection of Jordan and GOP Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana to serve on the committee, she would have accepted the Republican leader’s other three picks. Instead, McCarthy pulled the rest of his proposed members from consideration. Pelosi ultimately selected GOP Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois to serve on the panel.

Narrowing in on the committee’s investigative focus, Berke accused the committee of using the federal government to “attack perceived political rivals” and warned its actions could “open Pandora’s box and damn this institution to partisan ‘investigations.'”

McCarthy, he said, has no new information to offer the committee, and he suggested the panel should ask Cheney, who served as GOP Conference Chair during the time period the committee wants to discuss with McCarhty, if it wants further insight into House Republican leadership.

McCarthy and Cheney became public political rivals when the Republican leader supported a campaign to oust the Wyoming Republican from her leadership post because she outwardly criticized former President Donald Trump for the role he played in the attack.

McCarthy’s attorney in the letter also went as far as to say some members on the panel are overreaching by claiming to act like law enforcement. The panel has been clear that its role is not to prosecute any crimes, but to simply refer any crimes that its investigation uncovers, if any, to the Department of Justice.

“In composition, in conduct, in press releases, public statements, interviews, and correspondence, the Select Committee is clearly not acting within the confines of any legislative purpose,” Berke wrote. “Its only objective appears to be to attempt to score political points or damage its political opponents — acting like the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee one day and the Department of Justice the next.”

Berke laid out McCarthy’s demands that he wants met before he will consider how to move forward with the subpoena. Those include: Outlining what topics and documents the panel plans on using in a deposition, providing the legal and constitutional rational for both, naming the ranking minority member was who was consulted in advance of issuing subpoenas to Republican lawmakers and who the ranking minority member and counsel would be in a deposition, and limiting any deposition to one hour per side, alternating between minority and majority counsel.

In its initial letter to McCarthy in January seeking his voluntary cooperation, the panel made clear it wanted to question him about his communications with Trump, White House staff and others in the week after the January 6 attack, “particularly regarding President Trump’s state of mind at that time.”

The committee also wanted to understand how McCarthy’s public comments since the attack had changed over time from critical of Trump to in defense of him and questioned whether Trump pressured him to change his tone when the pair met in late January 2021.

Since the panel’s letter to McCarthy, new audio revealed that in the days following the insurrection, the minority leader had considered asking Trump to resign. Audio has also exposed that McCarthy told Republican lawmakers on a private conference call that Trump had admitted bearing some responsibility for the deadly attack.

The panel first reached out to Jordan, one of Trump’s staunchest allies on Capitol Hill, in December to learn more about communications he had with Trump on January 6, and with Trump allies who were stationed in the Willard Hotel war room in the days leading up to the attack.

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The administration is leaning toward sending the systems as part of a larger package of military and security assistance to Ukraine, which could be announced as soon as next week.

Senior Ukrainian officials, including President Volodymyr Zelensky, have pleaded in recent weeks for the US and its allies to provide the Multiple Launch Rocket System, or MLRS. The US-made weapon systems can fire a barrage of rockets hundreds of kilometers — much farther than any of the systems Ukraine already has — which the Ukrainians argue could be a gamechanger in their war against Russia.

Another system Ukraine has asked for is the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, known as HIMARS, a lighter wheeled system capable of firing many of the same types of ammunition as MLRS.

Russia has in recent weeks pummeled Ukraine in the east, where Ukraine is outmanned and outgunned, Ukrainian officials have said.

The Biden administration waivered for weeks, however, on whether to send the systems, amid concerns raised within the National Security Council that Ukraine could use the systems to carry out offensive attacks inside Russia, officials said.

The issue was at the top of the agenda at last week’s two meetings at the White House where deputy Cabinet members convened to discuss national security policy, officials said. At the heart of the matter was the same concern the administration has grappled with since the start of the war– whether sending increasingly heavy weaponry to Ukraine will be viewed by Russia as a provocation that could trigger some kind of retaliation against the US.

One major hang-up, the sources said, had been the rocket systems’ extensive range. The MLRS and its lighter-weight version, the HIMARS, can launch as far as 300km, or 186 miles, depending on the type of munition. They are fired from a mobile vehicle at land-based targets, which would allow the Ukrainians to more easily strike targets inside Russia.

Ukraine is already believed to have carried out numerous cross-border strikes inside Russia, which Ukrainian officials neither confirm nor deny. Russian officials have said publicly that any threat to their homeland would constitute a major escalation and have said that western countries are making themselves a legitimate target in the war by continuing to arm the Ukrainians.

Another major concern inside the Biden administration had been whether the US could afford to give away so many high-end weapons drawn from the military’s stockpiles, the sources said.

Asked on Monday whether the US would provide the systems, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin demurred. “I don’t want to get ahead of where we are in the process of resourcing requirements,” he told reporters.

The administration had similar concerns about providing Ukraine with additional MiG-29 fighter jets, which some worried could allow the Ukrainians to take the fight into Russia. Ultimately, the US decided against backfilling Poland with new jets, which would have allowed the Poles to equip Ukraine with the soviet-era MiGs.

The debate about the MLRS is also similar to one that played out before the US decided to begin sending heavier, long-range Howitzers, to Ukraine last month. Weapons packages focused on anti-tank Javelin and short-range Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, as well as small arms and ammunition. At the time, the M777 Howitzers marked a significant increase in range and power over previous systems, but even those top out at around 25 kilometers or 18 miles in range. The MLRS can fire much further still than any of the artillery the US has sent to date.

One workaround could be to provide Ukraine with shorter-range rocket systems, officials said, which is also under consideration. It would not take too long to train the Ukrainians on any of the rocket launcher systems, officials told CNN — likely about two weeks, they said.

Every drawdown from existing inventories involves a review of its potential effect on US military readiness. With the previous drawdowns, the risk has been “relatively low,” said Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley on Monday. The military is watching “very, very carefully” to make sure the stockpiles don’t drop below levels that create a greater risk, he added.

The concern grows significantly with more capable, more expensive systems of which the US does not have as large a supply, the sources said.

Pentagon officials met with the CEO of Lockheed Martin last week to discuss supply and ramping up production of the MLRS, one source familiar with the meeting told CNN. The meeting was led by the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Bill LaPlante.

The UK is also still deciding whether to send the systems, two officials told CNN, and would like to do so in conjunction with the US.

Frustration has grown on the Ukrainian side with the US’ indecisiveness in recent weeks, because they believe that once the US sends the systems then other countries will quickly follow suit.

As recently as this week, the Pentagon had told Ukraine “we are working on it,” said one irritated Ukrainian official, who added that Ukraine is asking for an update on the decision “every hour.”

“We are in great need of weapons that will make it possible to engage the enemy over a long distance,” Ukraine’s top military commander, General Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, said Thursday. “And this cannot be delayed, because the price of delay is measured by the lives of people who have protected the world from [Russian fascism].”

When Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba was asked Thursday what his country’s most urgent needs are, he responded: “If you really care for Ukraine, weapons, weapons and weapons again.”

“My least favorite phrase is ‘We are working on it’; I hate it. I want to hear either ‘We got it’ or ‘It’s not going to happen,'” he added.

Democratic Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado, who was part of a congressional delegation trip to Kyiv earlier this month, told CNN he believes the systems could help Ukraine gain significant momentum against Russia.

“I think it could be a gamechanger, to be honest with you,” Crow said, not only for offensive attacks but also for defense. He explained that Russian conventional artillery, which has a range of about 50km, “would not get close” to Ukrainian urban centers if MLRS systems were positioned there. “So it would take away their siege tactics,” he said of the Russians.

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As the cycle of American gun violence took its latest turn on Tuesday, with at least 19 children and two teachers brutally murdered at an elementary school in the small town of Uvalde, Texas, the response from the Republican right came from an all too familiar playbook.

Thoughts and prayers, obfuscation and inaction.

Shortly after the shooting, Republican Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, who for well over a decade has led his party in vehemently blocking a raft of federal gun control measures, decried the “disgusting violence” in Uvalde and said: “The entire country is praying for the children, families, teachers, and staff and the first responders on the scene.”

But prayers aside, there remains little to no hope of commonsense gun control measures making their way into federal law, despite support from the majority of American voters.

Within hours of the bloodshed on Tuesday, many of the national Republican Party’s most outspoken voices on gun ownership recited talking points now rote in the aftermath of mass shootings.

Texas senator Ted Cruz, who also sent prayers to the community in Uvalde, castigated Democrats and members of the media during a brief interview with CNN. “Inevitably when there’s a murder of this kind you see politicians try to politicize it,” he said. “You see Democrats and a lot of folks in the media whose immediate solution is to try to restrict the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens. That doesn’t work. It’s not effective. It doesn’t prevent crime.”

His remarks were almost identical in the aftermath of the Parkland school shooting in Florida back in 2018, which claimed the lives of 17 students and teachers. Despite a grassroots protest movement, in which hundreds of thousands of school children descended on Washington in a March for Our Lives, no federal legislation was passed. Jury selection in the death penalty trial of the Parkland shooter continues this week, a further marker of the trauma these mass shootings leave behind.

Meanwhile, Cruz is set to speak at the National Rifle Association leadership summit on Friday, in Houston, just 280 miles from Uvalde, alongside Donald Trump and Texas governor Greg Abbott.

Other senior Texas Republicans, who have presided over a series of measures aimed at loosening restrictions on firearm ownership in the state, reiterated calls to arm teachers, despite the fact the shooter engaged a number of armed officers as he successfully stormed the school building.

“We can’t stop bad people from doing bad things,” Texas attorney general Ken Paxton told Fox News on Tuesday. “We can potentially arm and prepare and train teachers and other administrators to respond quickly. That, in my opinion, is the best answer.”

Among other US Republican senators, perceived as more open to bipartisan agreement, the sentiment remained largely the same. North Carolina senator Thom Tillis told reporters on Tuesday he had not seen any indication in initial reports that suggested the shooter’s record “​​was in any way affected by Congress’s actions or inaction”.

Tillis continued to express skepticism over so-called “red flag laws” adopted by a handful of US states in the wake of Parkland, which aim to allow authorities to restrict gun ownership from individuals deemed a threat to public safety. In 2019 bipartisan efforts in the US Senate to support such laws failed and on Tuesday Tillis reiterated his concern that such laws were “overreach”.

While Democrats, who control the House of Representatives, passed two House gun control bills last year, which aimed to expand and strengthen background checks, there remains little to no hope of their passage through the split US Senate where 60 votes are required to pass legislation. On Tuesday, the conservative Democrat Joe Manchin also reiterated he did not support calls from within the party to reform senate filibuster rules, which could allow the passage of legislation with a simple majority.

There was no sign either that a new generation of Republican senators might offer any hope for bipartisan gun reform measures. At a victory party on Tuesday night in Georgia, the newly nominated, Trump-endorsed Senate candidate Herschel Walker evaded questions over the massacre.

Asked if he supported any new gun control measures in the aftermath, Walker responded: “What I like to … what I like to do, is see it and everything and stuff,” before being ushered away.

Supporters at the event reportedly booed as president Joe Biden’s address to the nation was broadcast, during which he asked: “When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby? When in God’s name are we going to do what has to be done? Why are we willing to live with this carnage?”

The president was far from alone in expressing indignation on the legislative paralysis in Congress.

During an impassioned speech on the senate floor on Tuesday, Connecticut Democrat Chris Murphy invoked the memory of the Sandy Hook massacre almost 10 years ago in his home state as he urged his colleagues to engage with reform efforts.

“What are we doing?” Murphy said. “Why do you spend all this time running for the United States Senate? Why do you go through all the hassle of getting this job, of putting yourself in a position of authority, if your answer is that as this slaughter increases, as our kids run for their lives, we do nothing?”

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